mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Rethinking Verification for LLM Code Generation: From Generation to Testing

arXiv 2507.06920 ↗First posted 9 Jul 2025cs.CLcited by 14

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning for agents, planning and code

Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved notable success in code-generation benchmarks such as HumanEval and LiveCodeBench. However, a detailed examination reveals that these evaluation suites often comprise only a limited number of homogeneous test cases, resulting in subtle faults going undetected. This not only artificially inflates measured performance but also compromises accurate reward estimation in reinforcement learning frameworks utilizing verifiable rewards (RLVR). To address these critical shortcomings, we systematically investigate the test-case generation (TCG) task by proposing multi-dimensional metrics designed to rigorously quantify test-suite thoroughness. Furthermore, we introduce a human-LLM collaborative method (SAGA), leveraging human programming expertise with LLM reasoning capability, aimed at significantly enhancing both the coverage and the quality of generated test cases. In addition, we develop a TCGBench to facilitate the study of the TCG task. Experiments show that SAGA achieves a detection rate of 90.62% and a verifier accuracy of 32.58% on TCGBench. The Verifier Accuracy (Verifier Acc) of the code generation evaluation benchmark synthesized by SAGA is 10.78% higher than that of LiveCodeBench-v6. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. We hope this work contributes to building a scalable foundation for reliable LLM code evaluation, further advancing RLVR in code generation, and paving the way for automated adversarial test synthesis and adaptive benchmark integration.

Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 30 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2025.

Builds on

30 of 49 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025ACECODER: Acing Coder RL via Automated Test-Case Synthesis3 Feb
  2. 2025Dynamic Scaling of Unit Tests for Code Reward Modeling2 Jan
  3. 2024Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report18 Sep
  4. 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code12 Mar
  5. 2023CodeCoT: Tackling Code Syntax Errors in CoT Reasoning for Code Generation17 Aug
  6. 2023Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug11 Apr
  7. 2023LEVER: Learning to Verify Language-to-Code Generation with Execution16 Feb
  8. 2022Competition-Level Code Generation with AlphaCode8 Feb

Other references · 22

  1. 2023GPT-4 Technical Reportcited by 18,396
  2. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,320
  3. 2021Program Synthesis with Large Language Modelscited by 3,637
  4. 2023Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Codecited by 2,139
  5. 2024Qwen2 Technical Reportcited by 2,120
  6. 2023Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generationcited by 1,391
  7. 2024DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligencecited by 1,181
  8. 2021CodeT5: Identifier-aware Unified Pre-trained Encoder-Decoder Models for Code Understanding and Generationcited by 906
  9. 2023StarCoder: may the source be with you!cited by 799
  10. 2024BigCodeBench: Benchmarking Code Generation with Diverse Function Calls and Complex Instructionscited by 546
  11. 2022CodeRL: Mastering Code Generation through Pretrained Models and Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 358
  12. 2023CodeT5+: Open Code Large Language Models for Code Understanding and Generationcited by 333
10 more
  1. 2023CodeGeeX: A Pre-Trained Model for Code Generation with Multilingual Benchmarking on HumanEval-Xcited by 300
  2. 2023TACO: Topics in Algorithmic COde generation datasetcited by 160
  3. 2025Competitive Programming with Large Reasoning Modelscited by 119
  4. 2023Execution-based Code Generation using Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 99
  5. 2024Evaluating Language Models for Efficient Code Generationcited by 73
  6. 2018The Art, Science, and Engineering of Fuzzing: A Surveycited by 62
  7. 2024TestGenEval: A Real World Unit Test Generation and Test Completion Benchmarkcited by 52
  8. 2024TESTEVAL: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Test Case Generationcited by 40
  9. 2024Large Language Models as Test Case Generators: Performance Evaluation and Enhancementcited by 28
  10. 2025ChartSketcher: Reasoning with Multimodal Feedback and Reflection for Chart Understandingcited by 13

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 6; 2026: 8.

14 papers.

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  1. 2025HardTests: Synthesizing High-Quality Test Cases for LLM Coding
  2. 2025CodeContests+: High-Quality Test Case Generation for Competitive Programming
  3. 2025Scoring Verifiers: Evaluating Synthetic Verification for Code and Reasoning
  4. 2025Can LLMs Generate Reliable Test Case Generators? A Study on Competition-Level Programming Problems
  5. 2026CodeContests-O: Powering LLMs via Feedback-Driven Iterative Test Case Generation
  6. 2026CodeScaler: Scaling Code LLM Training and Test-Time Inference via Reward Models
  7. 2025Klear-CodeTest: Scalable Test Case Generation for Code Reinforcement Learning
  8. 2026Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning for Sound and Adversarial Test Generation in Code LLMs